I Built GotGhosted After Getting Ghosted One Too Many Times

I spent over eight years in digital marketing and performance advertising. Universal Studios. SteelSeries and KontrolFreek — where I built and ran paid acquisition programs for the gaming accessories category. A stint at Amazon on the advertising side, working at a scale most marketers do not get to touch. By any reasonable standard, I had a strong track record.

Then I spent two years trying to get a job and could not land one.

What the Job Search Actually Looked Like

I am not talking about a brief dry spell or a rough quarter. I mean two years of applications, first-round screens, second rounds, final rounds — and then silence. Or worse, near-misses that ended in ways that were harder to process than a clean rejection.

One company extended a verbal offer. We talked compensation. We talked start date. We talked about the team. And then the recruiter stopped responding. Not a rescission call. Not an email. Just silence — total, complete, unexplained silence — after I had begun winding down my search based on what I understood to be a done deal.

Another opportunity ended in a different kind of gut punch. The role came through. The paperwork was signed. And then it was undone by an administrative failure so banal it felt almost impossible to accept — a systems error during onboarding that resulted in termination before my first real day. No recourse. No explanation that made sense. Just a door closing on something that had felt, briefly, like it was finally working.

The 3 AM Ceiling Stare

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from a job search that goes on too long — not just tired, but the kind of grinding mental weight that shows up at 3 in the morning when you are staring at the ceiling trying to figure out if there is something fundamentally wrong with you.

There is not. The process is just broken in ways that are real but largely invisible. You cannot see across other candidates' experiences. You do not know whether the company that went silent after your final round does that to everyone or only to you. You have no data. You are operating completely blind.

That invisibility is not an accident. Companies have always held all the information in a hiring relationship. Candidates have almost none.

The Decision to Build Something

At some point — sometime around 3 AM on one of those ceiling-staring nights — I stopped asking what I was doing wrong and started asking a different question: why does no one have data on this?

Candidates talk to each other. Review platforms track employee experience. LinkedIn tracks professional histories. But the specific experience of applying, interviewing, and being left in silence by a company — that experience was not being collected anywhere, at any scale, in a structured way. The ghosting problem was enormous and entirely undocumented.

I had spent eight years building data-driven marketing programs. I understood acquisition funnels, conversion tracking, attribution modeling. The idea of building a data layer for something that affected millions of people every year — and doing it in a way that was actually useful to candidates in real-time — was something I could not stop thinking about.

So I built it.

What GotGhosted Is

GotGhosted is a candidate credibility network — the first real-time, candidate-reported database of company hiring behavior. Every anonymous submission builds a company's GhostRate™: a score that tells future candidates, before they apply, how likely they are to receive any communication from that company during the process.

The score accounts for where in the process ghosting happens, how communication quality holds up across stages, and whether the company's process has integrity — whether what they say and what they do match. A single bad experience does not define a company's score. Two hundred consistent ones do.

This is not a complaint board. The goal is not to punish companies — it is to create data that candidates can actually use. A check-before-you-apply layer that does not currently exist.

Where This Is Going

Hiring transparency is not a fringe concern. It affects every professional, at every career stage, in every industry. The information asymmetry in hiring is structural and systemic — and the only way to correct it is to build the data layer that makes symmetry possible.

That is what GotGhosted is doing. Company by company. Submission by submission. The record compounds over time, and the more it grows, the more useful it becomes to every candidate who looks before they apply.

If you have been ghosted — at any stage, by any company — your experience belongs in the record.

Submit your story anonymously. It takes five minutes.

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